Journalism

Well …’s’what I do, innit?

A pretty extensive selection of my music journalism from the past four-and-a-bit decades is archived at Rock’s Back Pages, and I’d strongly recommend a visit there, where you’ll also find a whole bunch of distinguished commentators, critics and ranters doing their various thangs on a dizzying range of musical topics.

This page is your gateway to a bunch of my other stuff – which will eventually build into a sort of free-form virtual sequel to my 1991 collection Shots From The Hip. A kind of Shots From The Hip Replacement, to nick a phrase from the gorgeous Anna Chen.

Some of it will deal with music, but the initial selection represents other interests, topics and obsessions, drawn from a wide variety of different publications. There’ll be material on science fiction and comix, plus episodes from my periods masquerading as a legit lit crit and, possibly later on, as a technology pundit. For my a few examples of my forays into guitar-geekery during my time columnising for Guitarist magazine, fire up your Kindle and hit up The Guitar Geek Dossier.

Since I haven’t maintained a full cuttings file, all dates are strictly approximate. The versions you’ll find on here are my original texts, as opposed to the post-edit incarnations which saw actual print. Also – with very few exceptions – I’ve avoided the longer pieces: partly because online reading and print perusal require different attention spans, and also because I’m concerned about your longterm ocular health.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be uploading more and more pieces to the various sections (and maybe even adding new sections with more stuffage included) … so keep checking in.